lizvogel

I gave myself a year after I left the library job, and then lost the next two and a half months to the condo, and then did NaNo. So I decided December was my month of rest, and I would start my year proper in January. I'm getting a bit of a jump on that by revving some things up this week: yesterday I exercised, for the first time in ages. Yay! And I cleaned some things. Yay! And I also set myself to create a list of sources to check for open short story markets, because Monday is going to be writey-biz day, and subbing short stories is a significant part of my writey-biz.

I didn't quite manage to get a story sent out yesterday because I ran out of day, but no problem, I could do it today. A quick glance at my pile of stories easily identified which one to send first, and I could fire it off to F&SF because they're always open.

Except F&SF is closed.

Now I think on it, F&SF was closed when last I was subbing things, too. (It's been a long year and a bit.) I'd forgotten that, in the press of other things. But now they've been closed for a year and a half, and by all reports there are major internal problems at what used to be a reliable market, and writers not getting contracts/checks/notifications that their stories are being published. You can google the details yourself if you're as out of the loop as I was, but basically it sounds like a train wreck that's best watched from a distance.

And dammit, F&SF was the right place to start for this story. Now I've got to figure out where else to send it first, and worse still, where it might fit that's actually open. And this reminds me of why I'd grown to hate subbing stories so much, because just finding a market to submit to is a nightmare these days.

Rejection isn't the problem. It sucks, but it comes with the territory; there's no way to predict what story is going to work for which editor, so all you can do is make your best guess and get your work out there. And keep it out there until it sells, is the wisdom. But so many pro, and semi-pro, and even halfway-respectable token markets have ridiculously short submission windows, scattered across the calendar, many of them unscheduled and unpredictable. More than a few have no open windows at all; they're either solicited-only, or have some sort of back-channel submission process that I'm just cool enough to know exists, but not cool enough to have access to. It is legitimately difficult to find more than a small handful of markets I even could submit to, and then there's the winnowing of matching story to submission guidelines. My cute little dragon vets story is not a good choice for magazines seeking dark fantasy or hard SF, no matter how good it is or whether I can catch them when they're open.

And this wasn't supposed to be the hard part. I'm willing to do the work, both craft and business, and I'll take my lumps in the slush piles. I get that the process isn't easy. But it's not supposed to be impossible, either, and it's getting damned close to that. How am I supposed to do my part if there's nowhere left for me to do it?

As mentioned previously, the 2500-words-a-week thing has been working better in theory than in practice. That doesn't mean writing hasn't been happening, however!

January:

4685 = Green Ring
5185 = original short fiction (mostly "Venturesome Sheep Day")

Total new words in January: 9870

That ain't bad! Especially when you consider I'm coming out of a two-year slump with very little writing in it at all. If that's all the weekly-quota thing achieves, I'd still say it's an absolute win.

Speaking of which:

Week 1: 4097
Week 2: 1074
Week 3: 1634
Week 4: 1443
Week 5: 1622
Week 6: 1710
Week 7:   989 (Week 7 ends today, but I'm unlikely to get more words in before midnight.)

The average on days that I've written has been pretty decent, often at least within shouting distance of that magical 833 and occasionally well above it. The primary failure point is that I'm frequently only managing one or two writing days in a week. Now granted, I'm pulling extra hours at work and life has been insane lately, but I need to fit writing in more often. Relatedly, I need to speed up my "booting up" process so that a good writing session doesn't have to be a most-of-the-day affair.

The last time I sat down at the keyboard, I put the Mission Impossible theme on repeat. That definitely served to get me going faster sooner! (It's wildly not the appropriate music for the story in question, but it was good for that one scene.)

So that's the state of the writer thus far this year. Now I have to go get ready for my writers group, which paradoxically is one of the reasons I'm not writing today.

It's the start of a new year, and I have started as I hope to go on: 870 words this morning. Venturesome Sheep Day has long been lurking in my brain, the usual idea in search of a plot situation, but this morning I woke up with an idea for the mcguffin which has so long eluded me. (And thanks to the commenters on Pat Wrede's blog, who have occasionally asked if VSD would ever get done; I'm sure it was reading one such last night that got my brain working on it while I slept.) It's probably an overcomplicated idea, but I'm enjoying it so far.

Being the start of a new year, I've been reflecting, not on resolutions, because those are so closely linked with failure in our society, but on goals. My biggest goal really does need to be getting back to writing regularly, and this morning is a good start.

I did a little math, and if I could do 1000 words a day, five days a week, that works out to two novels and about 16 moderate-length short stories a year. Fabulous! The flaw in this otherwise excellent plan, of course, is that I can't do 1000 words five days a week -- or at least, I never have. But even half of that would be outstanding; I'd be quite happy with one novel and about 8 short stories a year. This morning's output, three times a week, would... be about that. Hmm. Eeeeeenteresting.

"One Night At The Wandering Comet" is available for perusal in the September/October 2022 issue of Analog, in mailboxes (and presumably stores) now!

Because it can be hard to lay hands on a single issue of Analog: I'm told that if you contact their customer service folks, you can arrange to buy a specific issue. You might also have some luck with The Dawn Treader Book Shop in Ann Arbor, which has been known to have a decent stock of back issues.

Lotta stuff's been happening, some of which may get posts as time/energy allows, but for now I'm just popping in to say...

"Dix Dayton and the Miner From Mars" will be in the Jan/Feb 2022 issue of Analog, available in mid December!

The "creepy fae thing" (a.k.a. "Going Home") is now in the hands of my alpha reader.

Writing challenge: Write what basically amounts to a 1500-word torture scene without overusing the word "pain" to the point that it ceases to have any meaning.

Oh, this sounds fun. 25 days of writing. Usually when I look at memes like this I don't really relate to a large chunk of the questions, but in this case I think I have something to say on all of them. Of course, this is me, so I'm finding out about the thing when it's halfway through (though apparently it wasn't originally an X-days thing?), and let's be real, I'm not going to do it consistently one per day anyway. But I think I will plink through the whole list, if not necessarily in order.

So, on to 1. Tell us about your current project(s) – what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?

The current project is to finish Lightning Strikes Twice, which is the sequel to ...And the Kitchen Sink. It's lighthearted space opera with spies. This one does not have the cyborg platypus of AtKS, but so far it does have flying ferrets, a whole lot of architecture references, and of course endless alliteration. And the occasional ninja, because why not?

Progress has been... it's hard to say, actually. Teeth-pullingly slow, subjectively; the first 50K was my NaNo 2018 project, so of course anything's going to look pokey compared to that, plus booting it back up after that long was hard. But really I've been plugging along pretty steadily. I keep running into hard scenes; the latest is one where a normally-voluble character has to talk about something he really doesn't want to discuss, and it's been... interesting, dragging words out of him against his will.

What I love most is Aubrey DeAugustine being snarky, of course. And Kearsley learning the ropes and becoming more independent is being a lot of fun. Also, I wrote a huge sprawling scene with lots of small talk (my weak spot) and it didn't suck! That was cool.

I'm also working on a short story affectionately known as "the creepy fae thing". It's an idea for a novel that's been kicking around half-formed in my head for a while now, but I recently realized that I could excerpt the beginning as a stand-alone short and it should work just fine, so I'm writing that. It's really dark, possibly the darkest thing I've ever written, so I'm taking it in small doses, but it actually makes a good counterpoint to LST. I'm having fun simultaneously leaning into the horribleness and keeping the description minimalist, so the reader's imagination can take it to far worse places than the text ever could. ;-)



All the days:
1. Tell us about your current project(s) – what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?
2. Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project.
3. What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway).
4. Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like).
5. What character that you're writing do you most identify with?
6. What character do you have the most fun writing?
7. What do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style? Would others agree?
8. Is what you like to write the same as what you like to read?
9. Are you more of a drabble or a longfic kind of writer? Pantser or plotter? Do you wish you were the other? Both, or neither?
10. How would you describe your writing process?
11. What do you envy in other writers?
12. Do you want your writing to be famous?
13. Do you share your writing online? (Drop a link!) Do you have projects you’ve kept just for yourself?
14. At what point in writing do you come up with a title?
15. Which is harder: titles or summaries (or tags)?
16. Tried anything new with your writing lately? (style, POV, genre, fandom?)
17. Do you think readers perceive your work - or you - differently to you? What do you think would surprise your readers about your writing or your motivations?
18. Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.
19. Is there something you always find yourself repeating in your writing? (favourite verb, something you describe 'too often', trope you can’t get enough of?)
20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)
21. What other medium do you think your story would work well as? (film, webcomic, animated series?)
22. Do you reread your old works? How do you feel about them?
23. What’s the story idea you’ve had in your head for the longest?
24. Would you say your writing has changed over time?
25. What part of writing is the most fun?

June:

original short fiction = 3871

July:

original short fiction = 4172

That includes the rest of DDJJ2 ("Dix Dayton and the Miner from Mars"), "Dear Ones" (which is now going as "A Fine Warm Tale On A Winter's Night"), and "Hands On", as well as bits and pieces of other things. Technically June includes 296 words of Street Magic, which is a novel, but it's not developed enough yet to get its own wordcount file.

In addition, 601 words in July on the "beach house" follow-up to HoM. I don't normally include it in monthly totals (because it's a sprawly character self-indulgence, likely never to be publishable), but in this case it's worth noting because I finally figured out what I needed to get a key sequence moving (hint: Dad games).

Short story submissions:
June: 6
July: 2

Two of which were acceptances!


Queries sent (July): 2


The numbers are actually pretty decent! (Okay, more querying, but otherwise.) The numbers don't quite tell the whole story, though; there's a lot of not-writing in there, for all I've been kicking it with the short stories lately. For example, all of July's writing happened from the 6th to the 15th, and not a word since.

I've been writing to deadline and/or to spec so much lately (anthology calls, ficathons, etc.) that I don't quite know what to do with myself when there isn't a specific (and close) target in sight. I need to get back to a semi-steady writing habit, with at least some focus on longer things. So for August, I'm going to try booting up Green Ring again; as a little for-fun fantasy thing (albeit with asperations to be a novella), it should be a good bridge.

Also, more querying.

May also had writing in it! Eventually.

original short fiction: 1493
The Kitten Case: 2227

Total new words in May: 3720

Which isn't at all bad! Especially since it's only for about two weeks' writing. (Okay, the fact that it was only two weeks is bad, but we work with what we have.) The short stuff was the start of another Dix Dayton story, and the start of a creepy little thing that might end up being called "Dear Ones" (which I've since completed, yay!). The Kitten Case is yet another re-start, but this time it's with actual plot stuff and chapters, so I think it might stick.

Queries sent: 6

Hey! Not bad!

No short story submissions in May, but I do have notions of where to send several this month.

For June: Onward. Finish DDJJ2, figure out where the bleep I stand with various novels, query. The usual.

It's like it's a real story. ;-)